Quantum Literature

What kind of world do we think we're writing about?

First off: if you’re expecting a typical quantum-woowoo piece here, where I wax poetic about superposition and entanglement and say that this means we need to write about mysterious connections between human minds and all that crap—this won’t be that. I want to talk about what the actual science says, not speculate about the entire universe being conscious. …And with that out of the way…

How do we write about reality as science currently understands it? Do we already have a mode of writing that matches the Relativistic/Quantum perspective? Or would ‘quantum literature’ demand a new approach?

This is hardly a new question—the movements loosely lumped together as ‘literary modernism’ were, in one way or another, arguments-in-novels between writers about how to express the scientific discoveries of the 20th century. At its heart, this tug of war had to do with what counts as mimetic literature—mimesis being the Greek term for representation. In other words, how can fiction accurately represent the world?

In the realist camp, we had authors like Thomas Hardy, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner,. This mode of writing assumes a given, human-independent world that can be described objectively. Its model is reportage; the author recedes into invisibility behind the text. This mode is the inheritor of the Newtonian model of scientific investigation (hence Hardy’s inclusion here).

But as the 18th century ended, all the arts were in upheaval. In literature, authors like William Butler Yeats, H.G. Wells (at least in The Time Machine), and later, Allen Ginsburg took a stance against objectivity. Their literature was expressionist. It tries to express the nature of the narrator rather than objectively describe an outside world.

Impressionists like Virginia Woolf, Joseph Conrad, Ford Maddox Ford, and Michael Ondaatje adopt a more flexible style. Ford said the author must write “as if rendering the impressions of a person present at the scene.” Sensory experience doesn’t arrive in a convenient, pre-digested form, so neither should narrative. Conrad’s stories, for example, meander according to the recollections of an unreliable storyteller.

Expressionism and impressionism were reactions against the end of the self-assured, objectivist model of the world held during the imperialist age. These writers were encouraged to experiment by Freud, Nietzsche, studies that highlighted the separation of sensory impressions from reasoning, and the development of relativity and quantum mechanics. But while these last two visions of physical reality can tell us how the world is not (it’s not an objective, ready-made place where events play out simultaneously), there are irreconcilable differences between them. We could confidently say what reality isn’t, but not what reality is.

This left us with a kind of anything-goes, free-for-all literature, where all styles and approaches are celebrated. And that’s great! The Age of Uncertainty was the perfect laboratory for wild literary exploration. I adore works like Martin Vaughn-James’ The Cage, Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Project For a Revolution in New York, Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, and Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the 21st century. Lacking the firm foundation of the Newtonian worldview, philosophy had turned from an investigation of reality into the self-sucking lollipop of language games. Paul Feyerabend’s dictum that “anything goes” might have been great for scientific exploration—and all the arts were swept along behind the self-annihilating linguistic turn, like leaves in a tornado—but this wasn’t a good time for anybody who wanted to take mimesis seriously.

The reason I’m talking about this—because it may seem that I’ve strayed from my usual unapocalyptic themes—is that while this malaise afflicted literature long ago, it has lately infected journalism too. No political position is defensible using ideas anymore—everything is a matter of taste, instinctive morality, or simple opinion. Reportage—the “who, what, where, when, and why” of objective news, is contested. Which brings us to the present moment.

Trump was successful because, if they’re consistent with their pluralistic and ultimately ungrounded philosophy, progressives have no way to justify their politics or even ‘facts on the ground.’

It is possible to tease a new realism out of the ashes of Newtonian mechanics. While we’ve all been trained to think that quantum mechanics means that we live in a world of indeterminacy, subjectivity and even overlapping parallel worlds, in practice all of that stuff, when summed together, gives you the mundane world where you still have to the laundry today. The implications of QM and Relativity for how we represent the world are a little more subtle than YouTube would lead you to expect.

In this post, I’m going to describe four ways in which QM, Relativity, and modern cognitive science can pragmatically change how we write fiction. Unlike, say, entanglement or time-dilation, they pertain to the macroscopic (human-level) world. They are:

1. The death of the omniscient viewpoint. There can be no narrator who stands entirely outside the story, invisible behind the prose. This is because the “view from nowhere” is impossible in the real world. This does open the possibility of a Rashomon world” where different people experience scenes differently, but not in the naive sense that we’re all playing the role of Wigner’s friend. It’s more like:

2. The Agential Cut. This idea comes from Karen Barad’s interpretation of Niels Bohr’s ideas. Bohr was arguably the chief architect of quantum mechanics. The agential cut is something that applies on the human and social scales. What it does is radically reshape point of view for the author.

3. Complementary narratives. Niels Bohr claimed that the quantum mechanical principle of complementarity can be applied at the human scale. This principle states that sometimes you can only understand something in its entirety by seeing it through two or more mutually exclusive perspectives. Think particle-wave duality. This idea might be explored in literature by constructing narrative gestalts.

4. The 4E cognitive sciences. Not part of QM, cognitive science nonetheless has things to say about how we write. The 4E approaches provide a radically different vision of what it means to be a human being. Simply put, we are all extended and distributed in certain senses into our environment. One potentially fruitful approach for authors is to explore enactivism’s idea that organism and environment co-create one another. In a fictional context, it means recognizing that each character is the mutually intersecting body and situation they find themselves in. Change the environment, and you change the character; characters change their environment themselves, and then this changed environment changes them. And so on.

These ideas aren’t just interesting for authors. They may be useful to ground journalism in a world that no longer believes in facts.